The polymake distributions and accompanying software are just normal RPM packages you are surely acquainted with. Use rpm -i
to install them for the first time, rpm -U to upgrade to the newer release, and so on.
The packages are relocatable, you can install them at a different location than /usr/local/polymake if you add the
--prefix option to the rpm command.
The Makefile for client development is marked as configuration file. You can there set, for instance, the preferable
compiler flags.
When you upgrade to the next polymake release later, your changes aren't lost. The configuration files you have ever edited are
saved beside the upgraded ones with .rpmsave suffix appended. After an upgrade you should compare these files and merge your
individual changes into the new version.
Notes
The most important prerequisite package for polymake installation, the GMP (GNU Multi Precision) library, is shipped
with RedHat and some other Linux distributions in a non-optimized form only (that is, compiled for a generic 386 CPU.) If you are
dealing with really large polytopes, or having especially long coordinates, you might consider to upgrade it by a version
optimized for your hardware.
From our download page you can obtain GMP packages built for Pentium 4 and
Athlon CPUs. Yet better, you compile GMP yourself. It has a highly elaborated auto-configuration mechanism you hardly ever need to
intervene in.
Since the polymake client programs are linked against the shared GMP library, you will benefit from the improved performance as
soon as you install one of these fine-tuned packages.
The polymake packages for Pentium 4 and Athlon CPUs are compiled with gcc 3.4 which is still not included as a standard
compiler in the most popular Linux distributions. Therefore the packages contain a copy of the C++ runtime system shared libraries.
If you already have installed gcc 3.4 on your site, you should better discard this copy during the package installation,
as it would surely match your system not that good as your gcc. Just use the option --excludepath in the rpm command: